Saturday, August 9, 2014

Unexpected Help

While I haven't been doing a lot with Machinekit and the BeagleBone lately ("real" work, kids home from school all summer, family vacation, etc.), the beauty of open source is that anyone who wants to can help.  Out of the blue on Friday, I got emails from github with pull requests for two of my projects:

malcom2073 added details for the PMDX-432 board to my pinmux spreadsheet for the beaglebone

jstampfl added the missing cape-univ-hdmi I've been meaning to write to beaglebone-universal-io

A BIG THANKS to both of you for the help!  I'd also like to encourage anyone else thinking about making a change to an open source project (big or small) to go ahead and do it.  It's a great feeling to help out others, and it lets the owners of the project know people are interested and using the code.

Along those lines, even (especially) if you don't need to change anything but there's a project you're using that "just works", send a quick note of appreciation to the mailing list.  Most first posts are from folks having some sort of problem, so it's always refreshing to get thanks from someone who doesn't need anything else.  Knowing your code is being used and helping others is the sort of feedback that keeps developers happily volunteering their time to write and improve open-source code for everyone to use!

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